Defining Southern Unionists… one part of what might end up a multi-part examination

First, I wonder just how many people have a one-dimensional, stereotype definition of Southern Unionists. Is it common to see them simply as Southerners who refused to release their embrace of the Union? Maybe folks also see them as Southerners who embraced Lincoln and/or affiliated principles with, say, abolition.

If so, well… you would be both right and wrong. There’s a little factual information in all angles of it, as jumbled as it all becomes like some disastrous mess of tangled wires, but Southern Unionists… just as much as Southerners who wore Confederate uniforms… need to be understood as much more complex than one-dimensional. It is not as some make it out to be… that all who were Confederates were screaming Yankee-hating, advocates of secession and the new Confederacy… and that all who were Southern Unionists were simply scalawags. I don’t think either set would appreciate the dumbing-down of who they were.

James A. Baggett looked at Southern Unionists from a political angle, from their support/lack of support for secession, and from the level of support they maintained for the Union during the war. You can catch a glimpse of this on the Wikipedia page for “Southern Unionist”.

I like the thought of breaking Southern Unionism into layers, but I think more layers existed. Perhaps a classification/sub-classification system would address this better than a 1-7 Baggett Southern Unionist grading system. Among Southern Unionists, there were, for example, those who were Southern-born and those who were Northern-born and lived in the South. There were also those who were Southern-born and had relocated to the North prior to the war… and during the war. Did not these, along with other factors not addressed, have bearing on Southern Unionism? For that matter, what of the waxing and waning of sentiments among Southerners in the war? Sentiments were not always static, and could be impacted by the actions of other (although, there were those Southerners who appear to have been quite static, despite the depredations experienced, even at the hands of those they supported… Confederate and Union).

I could go on, but… that will come with time.

Of course, having cited the Wikipedia page for Southern Unionist (admittedly, a dangerous thing to do), I have to warn readers that the effort made on that page to show numbers of Southern Unionists from the respective states isn’t considering all of the historiography over the years. Richard Nelson Current did that in Lincoln’s Loyalists, yet, I’m also finding myself taking a second look at his work as well, and am not always in agreement. I think, for example, that Current was too quick at dismissing the significance of numbers of Southerners who had relocated to the North, prior to the war, and joined the Union army. I’ve approached this before. The greatest problem that one has with this, however, is that the incredible amount of time it would take to sift through the enlistment records of Union regiments to find those Southerners. I only know that through my work, I’ve encountered this line of Southern Unionists rather frequently, the most recent example being with the Madison County, Virginia – born Nicholsons, who relocated to Doddridge County and donned Union blue.

It’s not that I think Baggett and Nelson were wrong, but that our look at Southern Unionists continues to improve with available materials, and continued study.

In the coming year, as the dust of my move settles, I hope to start tapping into this with a great deal more vigor. There’s more here, and I’d like to continue what I started in my masters thesis that I completed in 2007.

Unionism in the south is complex becasue the unionists could have many motivations and varying degrees of devotion. I think unionists need to be broken down into two main groups:

A. Dogmatic unionists who were firmly ideologically committed to the union cause

B. Opportunistic unionists. This groups is vast and includes those who while refusing confederate conscription, were not necesarrily pro union, mountain families who were “pro union” because a rival family was “pro confederate”, those (especially after mid 1864) who simply wanted to be on the winning side with out entailing too much personal risk, those who became pro union to receive protection from bandits and the criminally inclined who used nominal service in a Union “garrisson only” regiments or a union sponsored home guard unit as a permit to commit acts of robbery or murder.

I’m not totally in agreement. Calling those who became so intolerant of the conscription patrols as to enlist in the Union army “opportunistic” just doesn’t measure them properly. There are other areas as well, and I plan on expanding on them in time.

It might be helpful to distinguish between political and military considerations. Politics played out in the U.S. Congress for many years in the legislative branch of government. However, Lincoln’s operations played out in the executive branch of government. His orders to the states to furnish troops to invade SC was a military process done under the authority of the executive function of his office, and was not a democratic process.

Similarly, the VA secession convention was a legislative process, whereas the VA Governor’s refusal to furnish troops to Lincoln, and his subsequent orders to the Militia to rendezvous, was an executive and military process, not a democratic process. Popular actions in a voting booth, and popular reactions to military orders, are quite different. One is voluntary and the other isn’t.

There is a wide range of how Unionists or abolitionists were treated socially and while under civil jurisdiction, including being arrested. Likewise with how prisoners, deserters or spies were treated under military jurisdiction – hung or paroled. One could be a Unionist without being an Abolitionist. Consider Lincoln’s Aug. 22, 1862 letter to Horace Greeley. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.”

If you think a Virginia neighborhood was pro-Union, look at what they did with their prisoners of war, after the military turned them over to the civil authorities who ran the local jail. Many were paroled with the condition that they never return to Virginia. Others were sent to Richmond prisons.

Janet, I take the bottom-up approach, as opposed to the top-down. Working from the top (considering local political situations, etc.) can be precarious, and lead to generalizations that might not actually apply to the majority that get lumped into a group by the modern researcher. Instead, each person has to be taken one at a time, from their own situation, and often that means not knowing their political disposition or how military considerations at higher levels played into the Southern Unionist. Additionally, I find a lot of people get left out of the categories… such as what I call the “leave-aloners”. In their case, situational considerations may be a larger factor than either political or military, in their final disposition… wearing blue or gray… or neither.

I have seen arguments in several places recently about how people made “choices” back in the olden days. Such arguments seem simple and look at the “part”, but not the “whole.” Personal “choices” are based on multiple factors – legal, institutional, economic, social, cultural, moral, etc. To say that people “chose” to do such and such in the olden days does not take into account their whole situation, including attitudes. Judges, legislators, etc. “chose” to drink and drive in the ’70’s, before MADD. They knew better, but they probably didn’t feel guilty about doing it.